Thursday, March 5, 2009

Blogs' reach limited: Study

The recent study and comments by the Institute of Policy Studies is another one of these pointless meaningless exercises. I mean what's the point of comparing apples and oranges. The mainstream media is a mass media, heavily resourced and professional outfits whose mission is to generate revenue out of news as a commodity. Blogs are very different entities. Admittedly some blogs do deceive themselves into believing they are news outfits, but they seldom get close to competing with the traditional mass media on that platform

The innate strength of blogs is their nimbleness and cost effectiveness in maintaining a cyberspace community through which news and views can circulate in an unrestricted fashion. They cannot be evaluated as if they are a single business unit, not can they be benchmarked in terms of parameters more suitable for newsprint and other mass media. There is no comparison to the power of the blog, when you consider that it allows a single, otherwise powerless voice, to communicate ideas to the world and/or to the powers that be. Free and freely. Does it work? Depends on the ideas being floated. Many will die as soon as it is articulated. Some will reach the intended ears...and maybe effect a small change. Some ideas will assume a power beyond expectations, and perhaps even change the world.